


Things you can(not) get used to

by verywhale



Category: Joker (2019)
Genre: Hurt No Comfort, M/M, Menstruation, Selfcest
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-09
Updated: 2020-02-09
Packaged: 2021-02-28 06:53:41
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,184
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22629694
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/verywhale/pseuds/verywhale
Summary: Arthur suffers from period pain and Joker tries to make him used to it.
Relationships: Arthur Fleck/Joker (Joker 2019)
Kudos: 10





	Things you can(not) get used to

**Author's Note:**

> For nauy ♥ I have no regrets.

For two days Arthur’s been lying on a couch. For two days, long and unbearable like an eternity, he’s been curling and uncurling himself, closing and opening his eyes, pulling the blanket on and kicking it away the next second. He’s experienced that before, of course; it’s also a third Tuesday, just like a month or two, or ten, or fifty ago. But just like months and years and eternities before, it has always made him flail and wail, hopelessly trying to find a position in which the pain would ease. He knows he won’t find it.

For two days, Arthur’s been bleeding. The second day and the third are always the hardest, the most shameful; the days when the world around him shrinks and forces him to coil, knees to the chest, head to the knees. The world becomes small and tight and hot like a womb, and Arthur is like an unborn child that cannot imagine anything besides it existing. And now it bleeds and aches; the body is drained of blood, of dead tissue, of strength and all thoughts other than of itself.

It’s just these two days he has to live through. Once they pass, Arthur will even have a good laugh recurring them in his head. How he’s been unable to get up just to get some water. How he’s been restlessly rolling on the couch, unafraid to fall down—there’s been no more space for fears or cares of anything but this pain. How he’s been so small and pathetic, losing all motion and volition before his mother’s wicked gift. But that would happen later, after the spasms recede and let the thoughts flow back into his brain.

Today, however, the couch feels too cramped—it’s not suitable for two bodies. Arthur’s elbow bumps into something softer than the backrest, and when he turns his head, someone else’s hair brushes his neck. The stench of sweat and leaking viscera takes a step aside, freeing some spot for a stingy trail of greasepaint.

“Does it really hurt _that_ much?”

This question is like a poke on the stomach, and Arthur kicks these laughing bones behind him. He leaves out a choked, disgusted moan—probably the only sound he’s made since yesterday. Just like the urges for pleasure, for love, or for someone’s life being ripped out by his own hand—Arthur keeps them to himself. He keeps them so they can eat him from inside.

“Isn’t it something that happens every month?”

A stray thought sneaks into Arthur’s head, fast and heated like a flash of the lighter. _Stop asking if you know the answer,_ Arthur says without opening his mouth. The spasm dissolves and creeps higher, under his heart: this is where he has laid his arm around Arthur. His eyes startle, he stares at many things within one second; he waits for more pressure, or a tickle, or anything else that would add a new taste to that pain. One swift shot in the head rather than this slow, nagging, delicious bleed-out.

Another hand slides through Arthur’s hair, and he holds his ribcage close to Arthur’s back. For someone so painfully gaunt, his body is flaming, brimming with life—or maybe Arthur’s body is just deadly cold compared to his. He leans a bit upwards so he can bring his lips to Arthur’s ear. There’s no kiss or bite. He just keeps them resting, barely touching the skin, for that is enough to turn the bloodflow back, to restore color to Arthur’s beat face, washed out and paralyzed by cramps. The stress of his retching womb doesn’t stop—it spreads out, it takes a new shape. Instead of gathering around the same spot, absorbing the world in itself, it now follows Arthur’s all bends and joints, ebbs over each vessel, captures him whole in its net. He doesn’t know what to think, and those thoughts trying to pop up by themselves are too erratic and mean and indecent. They shouldn’t be here—Arthur would love them not to appear at all, rather than bother and fire him up only to die repressed, drown in slosh oozing between his legs.

In a moment, it gets too cold and empty, and then too intimate again. He lifts up, only to roll Arthur from his side on his back, to see his folded hands and raised legs and his dazed face, now disrupted and disjoined. This brash move has made his bowels jerk and breach and spill, his mouth freeze in a silent scream.

“Why do you still struggle so much? Isn’t it something you’ve got used to?”

Tears amass in Arthur’s eyes, his breaths now clogged. How many struggles he has to come through apart from these two days among seven, how much city dirt he has to scrub off himself before it swamps him whole and digests him, leaving no remains outside. But Arthur doesn’t say how many. It’s just another sick joke of his, for which he already has the punchline.

“There are— there are some things— you cannot get used to.”

He just chuckles, and it drills through Arthur’s ears deeper than the loudest, the most uncontrollable streak of laughter.

And the next comes his hand, now pushed through the emptiness of Arthur’s stomach. He can hear splashes, squishes, whimpers as he keeps crushing. The stomach is white and feeble and stuffed with blood and junk, which he continues to rumple and twirl between his fingers. He doesn’t even look at Arthur’s face—he knows what he would see. This knowledge alone is enough to let the second smile grow.

Yet Arthur cannot take his eyes, clouded by his misery, off the image above him. He watches his aloof white face slowly turn ecstatic, his eyebrows twitch every time he finds a new spot which would ache even more. Arthur chokes on his cries, which sound too hoarse and nothing like the cries usually do, and thinking of it sickens him even more. Blood drips down his hips just like tears drip down his temples.

When he must kick, resist, crawl his nails into his grimace and tear it off, he cannot help but gaze in helpless awe. He has two smiles. He wears the color of blood. His eyes are also gleaming, and he probably hopes that Arthur can’t notice it over the colors he has caked his face with. His hand grows colder and weaker with every punch and thrust and clasp, but he doesn’t stop. He doesn’t allow himself to stop.

He loses the grip. Arthur drops his face on the pillow, already drenched with tears. Gasps, coughs, laughs resound in this damp, tight, bleeding room. The skin under his fist becomes thicker, more resilient. His punches and pinches are no longer more hurtful than tickles. He spreads Arthur’s legs, holding them where they are wet and hottest, and almost lies atop.

Enchanted and still lost in haze, Arthur turns back and stares into his eyes. If there are things you cannot get used to, this pained look is not one of them.


End file.
